Daniel Boone 1964-1970

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I have something to accompany me during my work days for a while. I bought the full collection of the Daniel Boone series that ran from 1964 to 1970, the one with Fess Parker. That is a box of six cases of six DVD disks each, with five episodes per disk. Sometimes you see the ones that are in public domain, I suppose, that people have made copies from copies, and what you get isn't very good, but this is the 50th-anniversary edition produced by Fox, so the quality is very good. I bought it on eBay, unopened.

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It's interesting seeing the people who come through this series, often before they were famous for doing other things. Dan Blocker plays a bad guy in the first episode, before his Bonanza role, and Jamie Farr (Klinger from Mash) also plays a bad guy in another episode. The episode I'm watching now, there is a kid who I thought looked familiar but I couldn't place him. I looked it up, and it's Kurt Russell at fourteen, but he looks younger. From the credits, I can see that he will play four other characters in subsequent roles.

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The lady that played Fess Parker's wife, Patricia Blair, in Daniel Boone, also played the owner of a hotel in The Rifleman. But, in the Rifleman, she had a very distinct Irish accent. And, Ed Ames played the Indian that was Boone's partner.

Fess Parker also play Davy Crockett on a tv show. Buddy Ebsen as his friend.

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This is a long series, too long for me to want to watch one after another, so I take a break from it from time to time. I am only in the third season, out of six. It seems like someone got bored writing regular episodes, either that or they got afraid of their ratings because a few episodes in this season have gone too far, in my view. In one episode, Daniel Boone captures Aaron Burr, something that is not borne out in any history that I am aware of. In another episode, he rescues George Washington, who by then is president, from an assassination attempt. Then he saves the life of the child king of France and, in the following episode, he is rescuing the Liberty Bell, which has been stolen. They hadn't coined the term for it at the time, but the series seems to have jumped the shark. Since I am only halfway through, I hope it gets back to less sensational stuff soon.

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In the TV series, Daniel Boone had two children, a boy and a girl. The real Daniel Boone had ten kids. In the series, his daughter, while featured prominently in earlier episodes, disappears without explanation. She simply doesn't show up in the series again, and her absence is never acknowledged. Interestingly, her role was played by Veronica Cartwright, who had had a reoccurring role in the Leave it to Beaver series as Violet Rutherford, a role she again played as an adult in Still the Beaver. She had some guest roles in a couple of other series but I don't see that she had anything else going on that would have gotten in the way of her role in Daniel Boone, so they may have dumped her. Her movie and television credit listings are very long, particularly television; as an adult, she's played everything from Hitler's daughter to Ethel Kennedy. I am near the end of the second season now, and I noticed that I hadn't seen the daughter in a couple of episodes, so I went looking for a reason.

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